1.03.2008

2007 Report Card: It was a Very Good Year

I've been busy with the move to San Diego and the new job, so I'm a bit late in my 2007 report card.

I'll try to put up all the details later, but the bottom line is that is was a great year for readers of the W.C. Varones Blog. We started the year long silver, gold, foreign stocks, domestic stocks, Amazon, and Wal-Mart. We sold most of the Amazon mid-year after a near double, and the remaining Amazon we hold has continued much higher. Wal-Mart has been flat in a tough retail environment. Silver and gold are hitting big new highs, and stocks are up: domestic stocks modestly so, foreign and emerging markets not so modestly.

The monster trade of the year was to short Countrywide, which we did over and over and over. Every single trade was profitable, many of them immensely so. We shorted it at $42 in January, long before "subprime" became a buzzword. We shorted it again in May above $40 when the market thought the subprime thing had blown over. We shorted it again on the spike from the B of A bailout.

We also made a little money shorting IMH, another bad mortgage lender. I first heard about that one from Old Zeke, who heard some old geezer bragging at a poker table about what a great stock it was and how huge the dividend yield was.

The one bad call of the year was a brief short of Dell, where we lost a couple bucks.

I hope you traded along with us at home. Here's to a great year!

I'm not changing my positioning radically yet, though I've begun to move some a small amount of equity money into foreign bonds. I'm looking for further dollar weakness and a recession this year -- and I don't want to bet against the Prince of Darkness.

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Nailed it!

July 5 :